Related papers: How small can thermal machines be? The smallest po…
We model a microscopic heat engine as a particle hopping on a one-dimensional lattice in a periodic sawtooth potential, with or without load, assisted by the thermal kicks it gets from alternately placed hot and cold thermal baths. We find…
Fluctuations strongly affect the dynamics and functionality of nanoscale thermal machines. Recent developments in stochastic thermodynamics have shown that fluctuations in many far-from-equilibrium systems are constrained by the rate of…
Theoretical thermoelectric nanophysics models of low-dimensional electronic heat engine and refrigerator devices, comprising two-dimensional hot and cold reservoirs and an interconnecting filtered electron transport mechanism have been…
Absorption refrigerators transfer thermal energy from a cold bath to a hot bath without input power by utilizing heat from an additional "work" reservoir. Particularly interesting is a three-level design for a quantum absorption…
Single-qubit thermometry presents the simplest tool to measure the temperature of thermal baths with reduced invasivity. At thermal equilibrium, the temperature uncertainty is linked to the heat capacity of the qubit, however the best…
We study the asymptotic dynamics of arbitrary linear quantum open systems which are periodically driven while coupled with generic bosonic reservoirs. We obtain exact results for the heat flowing into the network, which are valid beyond the…
Development of refrigerators based on Thermoacoustic technology is a novel solution to the present day need of cooling without causing environmental hazards. With added advantages of absence of moving parts and circulating refrigerants,…
We discuss the application of techniques of quantum estimation theory and quantum metrology to thermometry. The ultimate limit to the precision at which the temperature of a system at thermal equilibrium can be determined is related to the…
Thermal machines exploit interactions with multiple heat baths to perform useful tasks, such as work production and refrigeration. In the quantum regime, tasks with no classical counterpart become possible. Here, we consider the minimal…
We experimentally demonstrate a recently proposed single-junction quantum-circuit refrigerator (QCR) as an in-situ-tunable low-temperature environment for a superconducting 4.7-GHz resonator. With the help of a transmon qubit, we measure…
We investigate coupled-qubit-based thermal machines powered by quantum measurements and feedback. We consider two different versions of the machine: 1) a quantum Maxwell's demon where the coupled-qubit system is connected to a detachable…
Hybrid quantum systems can often be described in terms of polaritons. These are quasiparticles formed of superpositions of their constituents, with relative weights depending on some control parameter in their interaction. In many cases,…
Thermodynamics plays an important role both in the foundations of physics and in technological applications. An operational perspective adopted in recent years is to formulate it as a quantum resource theory. At the core of this theory is…
We explore the fundamental limits on thermodynamic irreversibility when cooling a quantum system in the presence of a finite-size reservoir. First, we prove that for any non-interacting $n$-particle reservoir, the entropy production…
Distinguishing hot from cold is the most primitive form of thermometry. Here we consider how well this task can be performed using a single qubit to distinguish between two different temperatures of a bosonic bath. In this simple setting,…
We investigate the performance of a quantum Otto refrigerator operating in finite time and exploiting local counterdiabatic techniques. We evaluate its coefficient of performance and cooling power when the working medium consists a quantum…
We analyze a simple implementation of an absorption refrigerator, a system that requires heat and not work to achieve refrigeration, based on two Coulomb coupled single-electron systems. We analytically determine the general condition to…
We consider an isolated autonomous quantum machine, where an explicit quantum clock is responsible for performing all transformations on an arbitrary quantum system (the engine), via a time-independent Hamiltonian. In a general context, we…
We analyze the lowest achievable temperature for a mechanical oscillator (representing, for example, the motion of a single trapped ion) which is coupled with a driven quantum refrigerator. The refrigerator is composed of a parametrically…
Quantum thermal devices which can manage heat as their electronic analogues for the electronic currents have attracted increasing attention. Here a three-terminal quantum thermal device is designed by three coupling qubits interacting with…